Forward-thinking businesses are transforming to embrace the right technology for their logistics operations. While every logistics company is looking to upscale its delivery processes to service rising demand, few pain points continue to stress the final mile delivery companies.
Before we deep dive into the struggles of last-mile delivery operations, let us understand the concept and identify the underlying opportunities in the market.
What is Last-Mile Delivery?
The term refers to the final leg of the delivery process. The three miles—first mile, middle mile, and last-mile depict a product's delivery supply chain from manufacturer to customer. Last-mile delivery can be explained as the final hop to the customer.
The last-mile delivery cost is one of the most significant cost drivers (53%) in a logistics business.
Last Mile Delivery Automation: A technology born out of necessity
Logistic businesses need to provide the right experience to customers while tracking ETAs and successful deliveries. Often, many enterprises struggle to accomplish this well.
Read more: 4 Myths about delayed deliveries and the realities of dealing with them.
Last mile delivery coordinates the hand-offs between customers, ops and delivery agents. The pandemic outbreak has boosted the structural changes in the consolidation of logistics and retail markets.
Customers are expecting speedy ( same-day delivery) for their orders amid soaring growth in online shopping and app-based commerce.
Boosting the operational efficiency of your delivery business
- From unpredictable to on-time delivery
The accelerated usage of on-demand apps has amplified the customer's expectations for quick delivery. Businesses are striving to embrace the “new normal” without increasing delivery cost.
Last mile automation helps provide real-time order visibility to the customers & ops manager simultaneously. This real-time visibility from dispatch to delivery adds trust and transparency for all parties. It helps relieve customer anxiety in case of unexpected delays, thus reducing customer support cost and improving NPS.
Also read: Are your delivery drivers reaching customers on time
2. From spotty to strong communication
Once the delivery agent is out with the package, she might need to communicate with ops or customers, and vice-versa. Strong communication is the key to address the pain points before escalating into obstacles.
Establishing communication at the right time is an essential part of your logistics business success. Last-mile automation helps connect those dots by offering strong and instant communication between the customers, ops and the fleet.
3. From ambiguous to optimized routes
If you think you can manually optimise routes, think again. The permutations and combinations required to plan out a multi-drop route is challenging and time-consuming. It has been a common scenario where last mile delivery efficiency gets reduced drastically beyond a point due to manual intervention. This can slash the delivery time and result in unexpected delays.
Dynamic rerouting could be a quick rescue. Last mile delivery automation can help in negotiating the route and suggesting the best possible route to travel. It reduces the travel time and helps in adding productivity to the fleet on road.
4. From painful to delightful customer experience
Customers are the real drivers of your business success. A delayed or missed delivery can make your customers unhappy. No one wants to go through the trouble of managing complex business operations only to disappoint customers.
Last mile automation plays the role of cupid here. From quick dispatching to end-to-end visibility of the orders on-road, everything falls in place when you choose to shake hands with the right sets of technology.
5. From cost overheads to smart savings
The future sustainability of any business is often envisioned by two important key metrics—operational cost and ROI. Experts believe that last mile delivery services consume 53% of the overall cost on average. If done precisely, it can make your business enter the quadrant up and to the right.
Efficient route assignment, fleet tracking and actionable insights make it evident for a logistics business to overcome the unnecessary expense associated with last mile delivery.
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Let’s wrap up
Fixing the last mile problems is crucial for any logistics business. Problems like improving trust with the fleet, improving NPS with customers, and improving the efficiency of operations can be solved right away.
If you need consultation on the right technologies to solve your last mile logistics problems, you can book a free appointment with our logistics tech experts.
